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Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?
Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Francis S. Collins
.jpg "Graphic of angel & science from Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life")
Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.
Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary. Collins, an evangelical Christian, talked about his path from atheism to Christianity and his belief that science provides evidence of God. He cited the Big Bang theory and the fact that the universe had a beginning out of nothing. He added that the laws of physics have precisely the values needed for life to occur on earth and argued that would seem to point to a creator.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, discussed how the brain reacts to spiritual experiences. She talked about the current debate over whether transcendent experiences are merely physiological events or whether they reflect encounters with another dimension. Bradley Hagerty said she believes that "God is a choice," that people can look at scientific evidence and conclude that everything is explained by material means or that they can look at the universe and see the hand of God.
Speaker:
Francis S. Collins, Former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute
Respondent:
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Religion Correspondent, National Public Radio
Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Event Transcript
MICHAEL CROMARTIE:
Most of you, of course, know him by reputation and by all of the good work he’s done at the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Institutes of Health. You’ll also notice in his bio that he has an M.D. and a Ph.D., and so he’s eminently qualified to talk to us about our topic this morning, "Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?" Francis, thanks so much for coming.
FRANCIS COLLINS:
I thought I would start off with some background in terms of the particular area of science that I have spent a lot of my time on over the last 20 years, namely the study of DNA, and particularly the study of all of the DNA of the human, namely the human genome. With that little bit of brief background, then I’ll tell you about my path in the religious realm, going from being an atheist to becoming a believer and, more specifically, a Christian.
But then I’ll spend most of the time talking about the current conflict that appears, at least in this country, to be a rather unpleasant one, where the voices that are arguing that science and faith are incompatible are actually quite loud – even shrill at times. I’ll offer up from my own perspective why that conflict is an unnecessary one and provide some possibilities of how it might be resolved in a way that I think would be good for our future. I’m sure there will be opinions about this, and those would be great to hear.
So let’s start with the science, and, of course, I have to start with something from the media. Time magazine, like many other publications, seems to like to talk about DNA, as in this cover story from the time when the human genome was being completed in 2003.
I’ve noticed, however, that virtually all cover stories about DNA include two kinds of display items. There’s the double helix, of course, and invariably there are naked people. (Laughter.) I could ask you what that’s all about, but I think I know that it says editors realize that double helixes don’t sell magazines. (Laughter.) And they know what does.
I know there’s broad diversity and background in this room, but I’m not going to get deeply into the nitty-gritty of genomics. I will simply use this metaphor because I think it’s a pretty good one, that the DNA of an organism is its instruction book sitting there in the nucleus of the cell. All of the DNA of any organism is its genome. Ours happens to be about 3.1 billion of those letters of the code.
The Human Genome Project set itself up in 1990 as an international effort to read out all of those letters at a time when this was pretty controversial, and many people thought this was foolhardy because the technology to do this hadn’t been invented. But due to the ingenuity and commitment of a very dedicated group of over 2,000 scientists that I had the privilege of leading, we did in fact, two-and-a-half years early and about $400 million under-budget, achieve the goal of reading out all of those 3.1 billion letters in April of 2003 – rather nicely and poetically in the 50th anniversary month of Watson and Crick’s publication on the double helix in April of 1953 in Nature.
That was six years ago. So what have you done for us lately? Well, a lot of the effort on the genome since that time has been to understand how the instruction book actually does what it does. How do you read these instructions written in this funny language that has just four letters in its alphabet – A, C, G and T – the four bases of the DNA code? But particularly, we’ve been interested in trying to identify the ticking time bombs in the human genome that put each of us at risk for something. Progress here has been actually quite exhilarating.
It was really only in 2005 that we began to have sufficient power to be able to discover the variations that are associated with common disease, things like diabetes and heart disease. Each year since 2007 we’ve discovered dozens of genetic variations associated with risks of a common disease. So more than a hundred of these discoveries, each one of which shines a bright light on the possible mechanisms by which diseases come about.
Not only have we had the ability to identify those variations in the genome that are associated with disease, but sequencing the entire human genome in each one of us is well on the path toward reaching a thousand-dollar price tag, which is pretty amazing when you consider that first human genome six years ago cost about $300 million. This graph here showing you the drop in costs – the red line – of doing a million bases of DNA sequence at high quality is dropping faster than Moore’s Law for computers.
So this is a pretty dramatic time we’re in the midst of, and there’s no sign that this is about to let up. I think probably within another five years, the thousand-dollar genome will be a reality, and then that will make a very convincing case for including it as part of medical care so the information is in the medical record when you need it. This has created somewhat of a challenge in the research arena because there’s so much data coming out of these new sequencing efforts, but we’re having fun with it.
So where this is going as far as medicine – and for me as a physician, this was always the point – is the ability to identify individual risks of disease based on a study of DNA so that we would be able to move from a one-size-fits-all approach to diagnosis, prevention and treatment to something that is more specific for the individual. The way that’s going to work is already getting underway. We’re identifying all of these risk factors for almost any disease using the tools of the Human Genome Project. That in turn provides the opportunity to identify who’s at risk for what. You can already, for $400, send your money to one of these direct-to-consumer marketing companies, and they will tell you what your risk is for about 20 different diseases.
That leads to the opportunity for preventive medicine, which is obviously something you would like to focus more on instead of waiting for people to get sick and then spending a great deal of money trying to take care of them. It also opens the door to being able to pick the right drug at the right dose for each person. That’s what pharmacogenomics is all about, and that’s already happening for about a dozen drugs, although it’s slow getting into standard practice. The ability to develop new treatments based upon a precise molecular understanding of disease instead of just trying to guess what might work, although that’s the longest in terms of the time course, is probably going to be the most significant development.
So all of that’s happening. There’s a true revolution going on. I just recently finished a book on personalized medicine, which will be coming out early in 2010, designed to try to explain this for a non-scientific audience, namely the general public, to try to begin the process of people imagining how to incorporate this information into their own health care.
I’ve been talking about DNA; this is actually DNA. It’s a different sort of picture than you’re used to, where instead of looking from the side, you’re looking down the barrel of the double helix. It’s quite a beautiful picture that way, and I think this is a provocative pair of images to introduce the main topic this morning, which is, are those two worldviews that you see there incompatible? On the left is the rose window of Westminster Cathedral, a beautiful stained glass window, and on the right, a picture of DNA.
There are certainly voices out there arguing that you can’t have both of those; you’ve got to take your pick. You either are going to approach questions from a purely scientific perspective or a purely spiritual perspective, and the two are locked in eternal combat. I don’t happen to agree with that, so perhaps I should say a bit of a word about how I got there.
I grew up in a home where faith was not practiced. My parents were free spirits in the arts and theater and music. I was home schooled till the sixth grade. I was not taught that faith was ridiculous, but I was certainly not taught that it mattered very much. When I got to college and later graduate school in chemistry, I became an agnostic and then eventually an atheist. In my view at that point, the only thing that really mattered was the scientific approach to understand how the universe worked; everything else was superstition.
But then I went to medical school and discovered that those hypothetical questions about life and death and whether God exists weren’t so hypothetical anymore. As I sat at the bedside of individuals who were facing death and saw in many instances how their faith was such a strong rock in the storm for them, I couldn’t help but wonder about that. I couldn’t help but wonder how I would handle that situation if it were me lying in that bed, and I was pretty sure I would not be at peace the way these folks were.
So it seemed like a time to perhaps look at the question a little more deeply because I realized my atheism had been arrived at as the convenient answer, the answer I wanted, not on the basis of considering the evidence. I assumed there probably wasn’t any evidence for the idea that God exists, but I figured it was probably time to look.
A thoughtful person turned me onto the writings of C.S. Lewis, which was quite a revelation in terms of the depth of intellectual argument that undergirds a belief in a creator God and the existence of moral law. I began to realize that even in science, where I had spent most of my time, there were pointers to God that I had paid no attention to that were actually pretty interesting.
One obvious one, although maybe it’s not so obvious, is that there is something instead of nothing. There’s no reason there should be anything at all. Wigner’s wonderful phrase "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" also comes to mind – Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate in physics, talking about the amazing thing about the whole study of physics is that mathematics makes sense; it can describe the properties of matter and energy in simple, even beautiful, laws. Why should that be? Why should gravity follow an inverse square law? Why should Maxwell’s five equations describe electromagnetism in very simple terms, and they actually turn out to be true? A thoughtful and interesting question. This is certainly one that Einstein also wrote about quite significantly.
The Big Bang, the fact that the universe had a beginning out of nothingness, as far as we can tell. From this unimaginable singularity, the universe came into being and has been flying apart ever since. That cries out for some explanation. Since we have not observed nature to create itself, where did this come from? That seems to ask you to postulate a creator who must not be part of nature or you haven’t solved the problem. In fact, one can also make a pretty good philosophical argument that a creator of this sort must also be outside of time or you haven’t solved the problem.
So now we have the idea of a creator who is outside of time and space, and who is a pretty darn good mathematician, and apparently also must be an incredibly good physicist. An additional set of observations I found quite breathtaking and do to this day is the fact that the physical constants that determine the nature of interactions between matter and the way in which energy behaves have precisely the values they would need to have for any kind of complexity or life to occur.
Various people have written about this. Martin Rees has a book on this called Just Six Numbers. Depending on how you count them up, somewhere between six and a dozen of these constants are independent of each other, and I’m talking about things like the gravitational constant. Theory can tell you that gravity is an inverse square law, but there’s that constant in there to say how strong gravity is and you can’t derive that by theory. That is something you have to measure experimentally.
It makes you wonder, suppose it didn’t have the value that it does? What kind of interesting universe would that be? There are probably days where you think gravity doesn’t have the value that it does, when something seems to be pulling you down. But gravity is actually in this precise little zone, and it turns out that if you go through the mathematical modeling of what would happen after the Big Bang if gravity was just a little weaker, things would just keep flying apart indefinitely. And I mean just a little weaker, one part in a billion. If gravity was just a little stronger, things would coalesce into stars and galaxies and planets, but a little too soon, and before we ever arrived on the scene, a Big Crunch would have followed the Big Bang.
Each one of these constants has that same amazing, precise, knife-edge tuning to it. Now some would argue, well, so what? We’re here, so it must have been OK, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you can’t look at those numbers and not marvel at what’s going on here. You’re basically stuck with two options: Either those constants were set by an intelligence that was interested in having a universe that was not sterile, or the alternative is that actually there are an almost infinite number of other parallel universes out there that have different values of those constants. Of course, we have to be here in the one where everything worked or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
That second hypothesis, the multiverse hypothesis, does require a certain amount of faith because those are not other parallel universes that we ever expect we would be able to observe. So which of those is a more faith-requiring hypothesis? I would ask you to think about that from my perspective, using the Ockham’s Razor approach that the simplest explanation may in fact be the right one. This sounds a lot like all of these things are pointing us toward a creator who had an intention about the universe that would include setting these constants so that interesting things might happen.
Then there’s C.S. Lewis’ point that I discovered while reading the first chapter of Mere Christianity, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." Where does this notion of morality come from? Is this a purely evolutionary artifact, where we have been convinced by evolution that right and wrong have meanings and that we’re supposed to do the right thing, or is there something more profound going on?
That would be a very interesting discussion I’m sure we could get into, and there is lots of interesting research going on about this right now by people like Martin Nowak. But I would submit that evolution would have a very hard time explaining the most radical acts of altruism, where an individual puts himself and his future progeny at great risk by carrying out a radical sacrifice on behalf of somebody he’s never met. Those circumstances don’t happen often, but when they do, we admire them. We think of that as the example of what human nobility ought to be. Evolution looks at that and says that’s a scandal.
So all of that information, I guess, really began to sink in as arguments that made the plausibility of God actually pretty compelling. Then I had to figure out, what is God like? That meant going and looking at the world’s religions and trying to understand what they stood for, and finding that they’re actually a lot alike in many ways as far as their principles, but they’re also quite different in terms of their specifics.
Never having really known much about Jesus and discovering that he was not a myth because the historical evidence for Jesus was actually much better than I had realized – some would say better than the evidence for Julius Caesar – I began to realize he was a person to take seriously. I encountered this particular verse, which I thought was interesting. Jesus is asked, What is the greatest commandment in the law? He replies, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind." With all your mind! Boy, that doesn’t sound like faith and reason are disconnected. If you go back to Deuteronomy, which is where this verse is coming from, the quote is, "With all your heart and all your strength and all your soul." But Jesus adds the word "mind," which I think we were supposed to notice.
So I became a Christian on that basis. That was at the age of 27. Now, 32 years later, I find this to be an enormously satisfying way to be able to answer questions that science can’t answer – things like, is there a God, and what happens after we die, and why am I here anyway, which are questions that science basically says, not on the table for us. But they’re on the table, I think, for most of us as human beings.
So it shouldn’t be a problem, right? Faith and science are two ways of knowing. They have to answer different questions. Science answers questions about "how"; faith answers questions about "why." I like this description, which is not original to me, that basically if you are using both science and faith, you are reading both of the books that God gave us, the book of God’s words and the book of God’s works, mainly nature. No problem, right?
Well, there seems to be a problem. Have you ever seen the very amusing cartoon about the never-ending debate between cheddar and evangelical Goldfish crackers? In it a somewhat angry Richard Dawkins fish is saying, "We came from cheese," while a Ken Ham fish is saying, "We just appeared in the bag." It’s a funny cartoon, but the battle sometimes isn’t funny at all. It seems as if we’re locked in this kind of deliberation, this debate, which sometimes gets pretty hostile.
But how can you be both a believer and a biologist? I’ve certainly been asked that question on numerous occasions by people who find out that I’m a geneticist who studies DNA every day and I’m a Christian. How does that work? Doesn’t your head explode? After all, don’t you realize that evolution is incompatible with faith, so what’s the deal here? Do you, Francis Collins, not believe in evolution? If you believe in evolution, how can you be a believer? That’s the usual kind of concern.
First of all, let me say the evidence for Darwin’s theory of descent from a common ancestor by gradual change over long periods of time operated on by natural selection is absolutely overwhelming. It is not possible, I think, to look at that evidence accumulated, especially in the last few years on the basis of the study of DNA, and not come to the conclusion that Darwin was right. Darwin was right in ways that Darwin himself probably never could have imagined, not knowing about DNA, not knowing that we’d have a digital record of these events to study – but we do.
Among the evidences are the ability to compare the genomes of ourselves with other species. Not only did we sequence the human genome, as published in Nature, but we did the mouse, and we did the chimpanzee, and we did the dog, and the honeybee, and the sea urchin, and the macaque – oh, good heavens – the platypus, and those are just the ones that ended up on the cover of Science and Nature. By now we’ve sequenced about 40 different vertebrate genomes.
The ability to do the comparisons is really interesting. You can feed all of that data into a computer and say, make sense of this, without telling the computer anything about what these animals look like or what the fossil record said, and the computer comes up with this analysis with all of these species lined up in order. Humans are there as part of this story, and the computer says, this really only makes sense if you derive this back to a common ancestor in this case of vertebrates. We could even extend this to invertebrates, where we have lots of sequence as well.
When you look at the details of that tree in terms of which animals are clustered close together and how long the branches are, which says something about how long it’s been since they diverged, the matchup here with the fossil record and with anatomical descriptions is breathtaking. It’s all very internally consistent. You can’t help but realize if you read anything about Darwin that that’s exactly what he was thinking about. There’s a famous page from his notebook with a drawing of a tree with the words "I think" at the top, something that was beginning to emerge in Darwin’s own thought process long before he published On the Origin of Species. This is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, so we’re hearing a lot about Darwin.
Darwin, of course, has been demonized in many places. I think one of the mistakes maybe we’ve made is to use the term "Darwinism" to describe a fundamental discovery about biology without which you can’t really understand anything in biology at this point. You wouldn’t call relativity "Einsteinism." Darwinism sort of makes it sound like it might be a cult, a personality cult, and probably that hasn’t helped in this long history of misunderstanding. So let’s just call it evolution.
Now you might say, looking at this tree, that that doesn’t prove anything about descent from a common ancestor. If you believe that Genesis says that all of these organisms were created as individual acts of special creation, wouldn’t it have made sense for God to use some of the same DNA motifs, modifying them along the way? And wouldn’t it therefore seem to show you that DNA is more similar between creatures that look more like each other, so this doesn’t prove anything. And that is actually a defensible point if all you have is this kind of information.
But when you start looking at the details, that argument really can’t be sustained anymore. I could give you many examples, but I’ll just give you one because of the time. Here is one that I think really cannot be easily understood without the common ancestor hypothesis being correct and with it involving humans.
If you look across the genome of ourselves and other species, you find genes in a particular order with space in between them. Here’s a place, for example, in the human and the cow and the mouse genome where you have the same three genes. They’re lined up in the same order, which also is consistent with a common ancestor, although it doesn’t prove it. But I picked these three for a particular reason. These genes have funny names – so what do they actually do?
I’m not going to bother you about two of them, but GULO is an interesting gene. It codes for an enzyme called gulonolactone oxidase. So what the heck does that do? That is the enzyme that catalyzes the final step in the synthesis of vitamin C, ascorbic acid. You probably know that vitamin C is something that’s a vitamin because we need it. We can’t make it ourselves, and the reason for that is that our GULO gene has sustained a knockout blow About half the gene has been deleted, and there’s a little remnant left behind that you can see. The tail end of it is still evidence that GULO used to be there, but it’s not in any of us. In fact, it’s not there in any primate.
So somewhere higher up in that lineage this happened in a single individual, and that happened to be spread throughout all of the following organisms, primates and humans. That’s why we humans get scurvy if we don’t have access to vitamin C. Apparently in most of human history and primate history, there was plenty of vitamin C in the environment, so there was no great loss sustained here until we went to sea for long periods of time. Cows and mice don’t need vitamin C; they make their own. They have a GULO gene that works.
Now looking at that, of course, that immediately suggests common ancestry for all three of these species – not only suggests it, but, it seems to me, demands it because if you’re going to try to argue that the human genome was somehow special, that God created us in a different way than these other organisms, you would also have to postulate that God intentionally put a defective gene in exactly the place where a common ancestry would say it should be. And that was done why? To test our faith? Does that sound like the action of a God of all truth? It doesn’t seem like it. I could give other examples. But it is – once you look at the details – I think inescapable for somebody with an open mind to conclude that descent from a common ancestor is true and we’re part of it.
Despite that, we have issues, especially here in the U.S., about what people believe about this question. You all probably have seen the Gallup Poll that gets asked every year – and we could debate whether the questions are asked in a way that elucidates what people really think. But given the choice among three options, what do people say?
That first option, that God guided a process that happened over millions of years – 38 percent; the second option, that God had no part, that being a deist or an atheist perspective – 13 percent. But the largest number – 45 percent, almost half – choose the third option, that God created human beings in their present form in the last 10,000 years. You can’t arrive at that conclusion without throwing out pretty much all of the evidence from cosmology, geology, paleontology, biology, physics, chemistry, genomics and the fossil record. Yet that is the conclusion that many Americans prefer.
The history for that is really interesting. If you have time, read Ron Numbers’ book called The Creationists, which goes through how it is that over the last 150 years this has become the accepted position for many evangelical Christians, who are taught if that’s not your view, then you’re probably in danger of a slippery slope that will cause you ultimately to lose your faith. When I spoke in Nashville at a gathering of youth group leaders and youth pastors from mostly evangelical churches last fall, I conducted the same poll of about 7,000 people gathered in the arena. In that instance 90 percent chose the last option. Maybe they raised their hands because they were worried about who was watching them and they felt like that was supposed to be the answer. Maybe in their minds they were thinking, yeah, I don’t really know. But we are in a funny spot here in that this has become so widely embraced.
There are a lot of forces that are trying to encourage that view. If you’ve been to the Creation Museum – I haven’t, but I gather some of you have – it will show you this perspective of humans and dinosaurs frolicking together in a way that’s consistent in Ken Ham’s view with the 6,000-year-old Earth. Again, many children going to see this are probably walking away thinking, yeah, that makes sense.
I get e-mails practically every week from people who were raised in this tradition and perhaps have been to the Creation Museum – many of them home schooled or schooled in a Christian high school where young Earth creationism is the only view that they’re exposed to. Then they get to university and they see the actual data that supports the age of the Earth as 4.5, 5 billion years old, and they see the data that supports evolution as being correct, and they go into an intense personal crisis because they figure that if what they were told about origins from the pulpit and in Sunday school and from their parents and from their Christian high school is wrong, then why should they believe the rest of it? Yet these are often people whose faith is a deep and important part of who they are. We’ve set those folks up for a terrible struggle by what we’re doing right now in this country.
Of course, the argument that comes back is, wait a minute, let’s not give up so easily here. If you’re saying evolution is true, didn’t you just abolish the need for God? There’s certainly that perspective coming through from many articulate writers, not just Richard Dawkins, but particularly Richard Dawkins – the book The God Delusion. Of course, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett – the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, as they like to call themselves – are all writing prolifically about this and many times using evolution as a club over the head of believers, saying: Look, evolution is incontrovertibly true; that means your idea of God is wrong and, actually, by the way, religion is evil.
I had the chance to debate Richard Dawkins in a debate that David Van Biema moderated and that is still up there on the Web if you’re interested in going to look at this, although it’s now been a couple of years since this was published in Time magazine. I think that was actually a pretty useful debate in that it was not done in front of a lot of undergraduates, where you’re just trying to score points. It was actually done in front of the editors of Time magazine, who were quite sober about the whole thing.
I think we had a really interesting conversation, although we probably could have gone even further. Of course, from my perspective, having been an atheist and traveled this path, it seems to me that atheism is, of all of the choices, the least rational because it assumes that you know enough to exclude the possibility of God. And which of us could claim we know enough to make such a grand statement? Suppose the knowledge of God just happens to be outside of your little circle of understanding? Then would it not be the height of arrogance to say, I know there is no God? G.K. Chesterton says this quite nicely: "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, the assertion of a universal negative."
Atheism is a pretty dogmatic position to take. It’s a fundamentalist position to take, in fact. So atheism won’t do. So how, then, do we put this synthesis together? I’ll give you the view that I’ve arrived at, which in my experience is also the view that about 40 percent of working scientists who believe in a personal God have arrived at. And, by the way, it is 40 percent. That surprises a lot of people who think atheists and scientists are synonymous. In fact, 40 percent of us feel quite differently.
So here it is – God, who is not limited in space or time, created this universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned – that fine-tuning argument – to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. That plan included the mechanism of evolution to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet and to include ourselves, human beings. Evolution, in the fullness of time, prepared these big-brained creatures, but that’s probably not all we are from the perspective of a believer.
God, in that case, having a house that’s now well-designed for it, gifted humanity with free will and with a soul. We could argue about what a soul actually means. And at that point, humans received this special status: made in God’s image, not in physical terms, but in spiritual and mental terms. We humans used our free will to disobey God – that’s what the story of the Garden of Eden is all about – leading to our realization of being in violation of that moral law. Thus we were estranged from God. For Christians like myself, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.
Now there’s nothing in that synthesis, I would argue, that is in conflict with what I know as a scientist or with a reasonable reading of the Bible. We’ll come to "reasonable" in a moment because I think that’s where a lot of the arguments tend to get focused.
This is often called theistic evolution. It’s not a great term; evolution seems to be put forward as the noun and theistic – not too many people are quite sure what that means anyway. So we need an alternative here. The modest proposal is to go to the Greek and what we’re really talking about is life, including our life, bios, through God speaking it into being, logos, the word. In the beginning was the Word: John 1. Or, more simply, putting it together: BioLogos, God speaking life into being.
So there are objections to this. No surprise there. Some would say, evolution just doesn’t seem like a very efficient method. Why would God spend so much time getting to the point? Remember, a few steps back there, we said the only way you’ve really solved the creator problem without ending up in an infinite regress is to have God be outside of time. So, basically, it might be a long time to us, but it might be a blink of an eye to God.
That also is a useful thing to contemplate when it comes to this second question of divine action and is God involved in the evolutionary process or did he just set it up and hope it would turn out all right? That latter point doesn’t fit very well with the idea of God being interested in us and sending Jesus to die for us.
The intelligent design perspective, which is so prominent now in the evangelical church and, of course, is a flashpoint for debates about the teaching of science in schools, is basically this one, that evolution might be OK in some ways, but it can’t account for the complexity of things like the bacterial flagellum, which are considered to be irreducibly complex because they have so many working parts and they don’t work with any of the parts dropping out, so you can’t imagine how evolution could have produced them.
This is showing severe cracks scientifically in that the supposedly irreducibly complex structures are, increasingly, yielding up their secrets, and we can see how they have been arrived at by a stepwise mechanism that’s quite comfortable from an evolutionary perspective. So intelligent design is turning out to be – and probably could have been predicted to be – a God-of-the-gaps theory, which inserts God into places that science hasn’t quite yet explained, and then science comes along and explains them.
I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it’s questionable theology. It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn’t going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God’s omniscience.
Of course, the biggest question for most evangelicals is: As soon as you say that Darwin was right, haven’t you thrown out the Bible? Haven’t you started down a path that, ultimately, will cause you to deny the resurrection? Well, not so. I think we need only go back before Darwin and see what theologians thought about Genesis to have a better conversation about this. Now it’s gotten so defensive. But what did people say? Go back all the way to Augustine in 400 A.D. Here is a marvelous quote from a person who I think thought as deeply about Genesis as anybody has since that book was written.
Augustine is writing here specifically about Genesis: "In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it." And is that not what is happening in the current climate with, in fact, insistence that the only acceptable interpretation for a serious Christian now is a literal acceptance of the six days of creation, which, again, Augustine would have argued is not required by the language?
There is a wonderful book coming out this summer by John Walton, who is a professor of Old Testament theology at Wheaton College. He takes a completely new view of Genesis, which, by the way, makes me wonder how he could have signed the Wheaton College statement that you’re required to about the literalness of Adam and Eve because he comes up with a very different interpretation – and a very interesting one. It takes into account the original language, also the culture of the time – the audience that Genesis was written for – and comes up with a much more allegorical interpretation than I think most would have expected from a professor at Wheaton College.
All of this has led to lots of conversation. I want to finish up here just by telling you a little bit about what this wonderful group that I’ve been working with on the BioLogos Foundation has tried to do to provide some additional information here. I published a book called The Language of God three years ago, trying to lay out the harmony of science and faith that I had found in my own life. As a consequence, I received thousands of letters and e-mails from people who read the book or heard a presentation and wanted to go a little deeper and ask more questions about how to put together various concepts from science and faith.
I could not possibly keep up with all of those, so I have been fortunate to bring into this effort a number of fellows from the Trinity Forum Academy, which is on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and more recently some other distinguished scientist- believers: Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk. Ralph Veerman, who is here in the meeting, has joined this effort as well. All of this is being managed by a very talented program director named Syman Stevens. Together with support from the Templeton Foundation, we just launched a website on science and faith – the BioLogos Foundation website. Let me just walk you through it.
Here are some photos from gatherings at the international BioLogos headquarters, which happens to be my dining room table. (Laughter.) It’s a rather low-budget affair at the moment but not lacking in spirit and energy.
This is the homepage, which shows you some of the kinds of questions and images that we hope will draw people in. For example: "What’s the proper relationship between science and religion?" There are 25 of these frequently asked questions distilled from those thousands of e-mails, from which we have tried to put together thoughtful responses – not necessarily answers because some of these don’t have single answers. Some of them have options, various answers that might be consistent with the truth and we are not sure which one is right. But in each instance we think there are some possible ways of resolving conflicts that people are worried about. Each question has about a three- or four-page response, which is well-referenced with footnotes and links to other sites. If you go through the website, it will also tell you something about the BioLogos mission – the questions, again, being the main part of this.
We have other projects that are getting underway – among them the opportunity to run a workshop next November in New York, where we’re going to bring together scientists, theologians and pastors in a closed meeting, about 15 of each, and try to see if over a three-day period with people who are willing to be open-minded, we can get beyond this defensiveness between science and faith and into a theology that is celebrating what we are learning about God’s creation instead of worrying about it being a threat to God.
We also have started a blog, and, in fact, we have been fortunate to be invited by Beliefnet to post this new blog on their website, which gets 22 million hits a month, in a series called "Science and the Sacred." Karl Giberson, Darrel Falk and I will alternate as weekly bloggers.
On the BioLogos website, we have a news and events page as well, including a reference to the conversation that I had with Christianity Today, and shortly the Time magazine and the Religion Newswire pieces will be there too. There’s a resource page that points to lots of other books and leading figures for people who are interested in knowing what else is published that’s out there, with little descriptions of each of these books. On the contact page we provide the opportunity for people to send us queries, which we will try to keep up with, suggestions about new questions that aren’t on the list, suggestions about places where they thought the question missed the point. We want this to be an interactive site.
The team is pretty small, but we hope over the course of time to be able to enlarge that. It does seem, at least from the initial reaction in the first few days, that this is finding a niche that was otherwise not much occupied. There’s a lot out there in terms of the voices coming from the extreme ends of the spectrum – the atheist fundamentalists or the religious fundamentalists. We hope to make a contribution to filling that void.
So I think with that, I will draw this to a close. I just want to say what a privilege it is to be here to speak in front of all of you and how much I look forward to Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s presentation and to the discussion that will follow. Thank you very much.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE:
Thank you, Dr. Collins.(Applause.)
We asked Barbara to respond because, ladies and gentlemen, in two weeks Barbara’s new book, The Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, will be out. Well, it’s out now! I mean, I’ve got a copy right here. But we love having your colleagues respond to subjects, and it was wonderful to find out that Barbara’s book that she’s been working on for some time was just coming out at the same time as this event. So, Barbara, we’re delighted that you can add comments, and then we’ll get into the Q&A; and the conversation.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY:
I was sitting here listening to Francis and the line from Admiral [James] Stockdale occurred, which is – remember, he was standing there in the [1992 vice presidential] debates and he said, "Who am I and why am I here?" (Laughter.) That’s a little bit how I feel right now: a religion correspondent following the former head of the Genome Project. But I will plow ahead because that’s my mandate. I will not do it without notes the way Francis can do things without notes.
I’ve thought a lot about the evidence for or against God, or kind of an intelligence that stitches together the universe, over the last few years in terms of writing my book. I remember having an epiphany about four years ago. I was on the Cambridge-Templeton grant. I was doing their fellowship at Cambridge University for two months, and in that fellowship, as you may know, they have a lot of scientists come and speak to 10 journalists that have been selected.
So I was sitting there – it was a day that John Barrow was going to speak. John Barrow is a brilliant mathematician at Cambridge who was giving a presentation about the anthropic principle, the notion of a fine-tuned universe. Sitting at the table with us, actually, right next to me was Richard Dawkins. He wanted to hear Barrow speak. As you know, Dawkins is a very vocal and famous atheist. So as Barrow was speed-walking us through the argument that we live in an exquisitely calibrated universe, kind of what I think Freeman Dyson said: It’s as if the universe knew we were coming. As he was walking us through this, Barrow said almost as an aside, I’m quite happy with a traditional, theistic view of the universe.
I’m sitting next to Dawkins and I’m feeling him kind of roil like a teapot about to blow. So finally he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he said: Why on earth do you believe in God? And everyone looked at Barrow. And Barrow said: If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world. Yes, but why do you want to look for divine action, Dawkins said. Well, Barrow said, for the same reason that someone might not want to.
I remember thinking right there: God is a choice. We can look for or exclude the action of the divine. You can look at the evidence and conclude that everything is explained by material means or you can look at the world and the universe and see the hand of God. I don’t think that science can referee this question. I don’t think they can actually get at the answer on this because I think, fundamentally, whether you believe in God is a matter of belief.
For the past century, materialism had reigned triumphant. Now Francis said that about 40 percent of scientists believe in God. Very prominent scientists, though, at the National Academy of Sciences, only about 7 percent of them believe in God, and they often are the ones who are driving the debate.
This is radically different from the public. I’m not just talking about people who pray. You know, 90 percent of people pray; even atheists pray, which I’ve always puzzled over. But the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has done extensive polling on people who have spiritual experiences – not just believe in God, but a spiritual experience. It turns out that 51 percent of people have had a spiritual experience that absolutely transformed their lives, that they can go back and say, June 14th, 1995, 2:00, that day I felt something different and it transformed my life. That’s a lot of people.
So now I think there is a move afoot among scientists to, if not embrace, then at least study this thing called spiritual experience. They can do that because they have the technology to do that or at least to start to make inroads. They have brain scanners and EEGs, which allow them to peer into the brain.
Back in 2006, I took a year off from NPR to just study, to look at what I think of as the emerging science of spirituality. My litmus test in doing my research was this: Basically, if a prominent scientist or if prominent scientists were investigating some aspect of spiritual experience, then it was fair game for me to report on it. So I encountered questions like, is there a "God spot" in the brain? Is there a God chemical? Is God all in your head? These questions are a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but, actually, they let me tackle the science and explore some big philosophical questions. What I thought I’d do today is just talk about a couple of these questions and tell a couple of stories.
First I attacked the question of the "God spot" in the brain: Is there an area of the brain that handles or mediates spiritual experience – by spiritual experience I mean that notion, that transcendent moment that you have, that sense that there’s another being in the room or around you. Is there a place in the brain that actually mediates that? The question is, if you can locate the place that mediates spiritual experience, does that mean that God is nothing more than brain tissue?
People have long suspected that the temporal lobe has something to do with religious experience. The temporal lobe runs along the side of your head, and it handles things like hearing and smell and memory and emotion. The first concrete evidence that there was a connection between the temporal lobe and spiritual experience was made by a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield.
Back in the 1940s and ’50s, he began mucking around in the brains of patients as he operated on them. There aren’t any pain receptors in the brain, so he’d go in and he could take an electrode and prod a part of the brain – keep them awake – prod a part of the brain and see what part of the body corresponded with that part of the brain. He would prod one little section, and he’d get the right big toe; he’d prod another section, and he’d get the lips. He actually made a map of the brain and how it corresponds to different body parts. Well, when he prodded the temporal lobe, something very strange happened. People reported having out-of-body experiences and hearing voices and seeing apparitions. He hypothesized that he might have found the seat of religious experience, the physical seat of religious experience.
So science figured out that one way to try to explore spiritual experience and look at the brain mechanics of religious experience is to look at people with temporal lobe epilepsy on the theory that the extreme elucidates the normal. Temporal lobe epilepsy is basically an electrical storm in the brain where all the cells fire together.
Usually seizures are really horrible things. I went to a Henry Ford hospital to the epilepsy clinic and I cannot tell you – it was just – it’s a horrifying experience to watch a seizure. But in a few rare cases, people have ecstatic seizures, and they believe that they are having a religious experience. They may hear snatches of music or words, presumably from their memory bank, and they interpret it as a message from God or the music from the heavenly spheres. They may see a snatch of light and think that that’s an angel.
You can probably see where this is going. Today a lot of neuroscientists have kind of retrofitted a lot of major religious leaders with temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Saul on the road to Damascus – was he blinded by God and heard Jesus’ voice or did he suffer, as one neurologist said, "visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness."
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, did he see a pillar of light and two angels or did he suffer a complex partial seizure? What about Moses and the burning bush, hearing God’s voice? The list, which is compiled by Jeffrey Saver at UCLA, who is a neurologist there, includes Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, the founders of the Shaker movement, the New Jerusalem Church, the Christian Science Church, 7th Day Adventists, virtually all the mystics. All of these people, they say, suffered from the sacred disease, which actually raises a question.
You being an expert, I’d love to know, Francis, is there a gene – you talked about genes that can be identified with different diseases. I wonder if there is a gene for the sacred disease, which would be religious experience.
MICHAEL CROMARTIE:
Andrew Newberg addresses that.BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY:
He does.
Now I’ve got to say, I have a little trouble with this analysis, this kind of retrofitting, because it’s hard to imagine something as debilitating as epilepsy being high on the résumé, you know, helpful in writing, say, the bulk of Christian doctrine, as did Paul; guiding a nation through the wilderness for 40 years, as did Moses; or founding one of the three monotheistic religions, as did Mohammed. It’s hard to imagine that epilepsy is actually helpful in that.
But I do think that scientists are onto something. I think the temporal lobe may in fact be the place that mediates spiritual experience. One of the reasons I think that – I mean, I did a lot of research here – but one of my favorite stories, one of the people who convinced me of this is a guy named Jeff Schimmel. Jeff is a writer in Hollywood. He was raised Jewish, never believed in God, had no interest in spirituality. Then a few years ago, nine years ago, when he was 40 years old, he had a benign tumor in his left temporal lobe removed.
The surgery was a snap, but a couple of years later, unknown to him, he began to suffer from mini-seizures. He began hearing things and having visions. He remembers twice lying in bed when he looked up at the ceiling and saw a kind of swirl of blue and gold and green all settle into a shape, a pattern. And he’s looking at it and he’s thinking, what is that? He said, then it dawned on me, it was the Virgin Mary. Then he thinks, why would the Virgin Mary appear to a Jewish guy? (Laughter.) She could do so much better. But a few other things began to happen to Jeff. He became fascinated with spirituality. He found himself weeping at the drop of a hat when he saw pain in other people. He became very interested in Buddhism.
When I talked to him for the first time, I said, how do you measure your spirituality? He said, well, OK – we were on the phone – I’m looking at my mantle and I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 Buddhas sitting on the mantle. I mean, he became fairly obsessed with Buddhism.
But he began to wonder, could his newfound spirituality have anything to do with his brain? So the next time he visited his neurologist, he asked to see a picture of his brain scan, the most recent one. And, in fact, the temporal lobe was very different – he saw the before and after the surgery. It was very different. It had kind of pulled away from the skull. His temporal lobe was smaller, a different shape, it was covered with scar tissue, and those changes had begun to spark electrical firings in his brain. He essentially developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But there was no question in his mind that his faith, his newfound love for his fellow man, all of that, came from his brain.
So this begged a question in my mind: Are transcendent experiences – not just Jeff Schimmel’s, but Teresa of Avila’s – are they merely a physiological event or could it possibly reflect an encounter with another dimension?
I want to propose that how you come down on that issue depends on whether you think of the brain as a CD player or a radio. Most scientists who think that everything is explainable through material processes think that the brain is like a CD player: The content, the CD with the song on it, for example, is playing in a closed system, and if you take a hammer to the machine, you know, destroy it, the song is not going to play. In other words, no God exists outside of the brain, no God that is trying to communicate exists outside of the brain. All spiritual experience is inside the brain, and when you alter the brain, God and spirituality disappear.
Now there is some scientific support for this line of thinking. These days scientists can make transcendent realities, or God, disappear or appear at will. It’s kind of a party trick. Recently a group of Swiss researchers found out that when they electrically stimulated a certain part of the brain in a woman, she suddenly felt a sensed presence, that there was another being in the room enveloping her. A lot of people describe God that way: a sensed presence, a being nearby enveloping them. So they could conjure up God just by poking part of the brain.
Making spiritual experiences disappear is, of course, far more common. It’s what epilepsy specialists are actually trained to do: It’s called treatment. You remove part of the temporal lobe or you medicate the brain and tamp down the electrical spikes and, voila, God disappears, all spiritual experience goes away.
But suppose the brain isn’t a CD player. Suppose it’s a radio. Now in this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program in varying degrees. So some have the volume turned low. I would suspect that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have hit the mute button. Other people hear their favorite programs every now and again, maybe some of you all, like me, who have had brief transcendent moments. Some people have the volume way too high or they’re caught between stations and they hear a cacophony, and those people actually need medical help.
But in this analogy, the sender is separate from the receiver, and the content of the transmission doesn’t originate in the brain anymore than, say, the hosts of "All Things Considered" are sitting in your radio when they’re broadcasting, right? So if you destroyed the radio, you’re not going to hear "All Things Considered," but the transmission – the words of Robert Siegel or Michele Norris – that transmission is still operating. If the brain is a receiver, then it’s picking up God’s communications, which never stop, even when the brain does, even when the brain has been altered by surgery or medication or death.
So that’s not to say that all of our thoughts come from another spiritual realm any more than all of our thoughts come from "All Things Considered," although I would suspect that all of my thoughts come from "All Things Considered." But it merely suggests that perhaps people who have vivid or frequent transcendent moments are able to tune into another dimension of reality that many of us ignore. Maybe St. Paul and Joan of Arc weren’t crazy; maybe they just had better antennae.
So that’s one debate about the brain and whether spiritual experience is just something within the brain or something that may transcend the brain. Another argument that God is all in your head comes from neuropharmacologists. They propose that God is nothing more than chemical reactions in your brain.
I remember thinking about this a couple of years ago as I sat for 11 hours, from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. on the dirt floor of a teepee. I was at a Navajo peyote ceremony in Lukachukai, Ariz. There were about 30 of us. Everyone but me had ingested a whole lot of peyote – the active ingredient is mescaline. It’s basically a psychedelic. I kind of wish I had as I watched everyone looking pretty happy, their heads bobbing to the beat of the drummers like little bobbleheads. But, alas, I was there to observe. So there I sat cross-legged for 11 hours.
Around midnight the woman who was the center of the ceremony broke her silence. Her name was Mary Ann, and she suffered from shingles. She had had it for a couple of months. It had gone untreated, and this was a healing ceremony. Around that time she confessed that 20 years earlier she had accidentally run over a man on the highway. She stated he was already dead when she ran over his head. But at any rate, for the past 20 years, a headless man kept haunting her dreams, and she wanted forgiveness. She wanted the peyote, which Navajos consider to be the mediator between the spirit world and the human world – she wanted the peyote to kind of broker the deal between this guy whose head she had run over and her.
So I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed that we may have just had a confession to vehicular homicide. Everyone was just smiling happily and nodding. A few hours later, after a lot more peyote, Mary Ann announced that the shingles were gone. She said, the spirit came before me and forgave me and now I’m healed.
I’m sitting there thinking, yeah, right, we’ll revisit this in a couple of days and see if the shingles are really gone. I called her a couple of months later, and, in fact, she had never suffered from shingles after that moment. I called her just a few days ago and it never recurred.
So what you’ve got here are three options: Door No. 1, there was a medicinal property to the peyote that cured her shingles; door No. 2, the relief that she felt from her vision reduced her stress and thus her shingles; or door No. 3, that she really did access the spiritual world.
Peyote is like other psychedelic drugs, including LSD and magic mushrooms – magic mushrooms and psilocybin are kind of the same thing. They seem to prompt mystical experience. Scientists have discovered recently that these psychedelic drugs have a couple of interesting things in common.
Chemically, they all look a lot like serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that affects parts of the brain that relate to emotions and perception. Now scientists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that they all target the same serotonin receptor, serotonin HT2A. So what that receptor does is, it allows the serotonin or the psilocybin or the active ingredient of these psychedelics to create a cascade of chemical reactions, which then create the sounds and sights and smells and perceptions of a mystical experience. Essentially, they’ve discovered a "God neurotransmitter," in a way.
So now they can get a sense of what happens in the brains of mystics or you and me when we have a spiritual experience. What’s really cool about this is that the war on drugs ended this sort of research for about 35 years, but now at Johns Hopkins and other places, the government’s allowing this to go on. They’ll be able to give you a capsule of psilocybin, slide you into a brain scan, and actually watch spiritual experience unfold in an FMRI. This has really opened the door for understanding the brain mechanisms of spiritual experience.
(end of article)
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